Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
Looks like one may be forming right now.
Judith Curry published the post ENSO forecast for 2018 yesterday. On the thread (here) I asked and stated:
Judith, the question that needs answering: Are weather conditions right for a series of westerly wind bursts in the western tropical Pacific? Without westerly wind bursts to initiate downwelling Kelvin waves, there will be no El Niño.
So this morning I checked with the NOAA GODAS website, and, yes, there have been westerly wind bursts this year. See the hovmoller plot of the “Surface zonal wind stress anomaly” from the GODAS Pentad Anomaly Products webpage (my Figure 1 below).
Figure 1
Then it was time to check the subsurface temperature anomalies for the equatorial Pacific. And they can be found at the NOAA CDC webpage here. See animation 1 below. A downwelling Kelvin wave is already making its way across the equatorial Pacific.
Animation 1
So to answer the title question, it obviously appears the initial phases of the processes that initiate an El Niño are already in progress.
Will an El Niño in 2018/19 be strong enough to permanently raise global sea surface temperatures?
Only time will tell. And if you’re wondering how a strong El Niño can (and does) raise global sea surface temperatures permanently, then you obviously haven’t read my ebook Dad, Why Are You A Global Warming Denier? – A Short Story That’s Right for the Times, which is available in Kindle ebook and in paperback editions. In that book, I’ve explained how a strong El Niño can (and does) raise global sea surface temperatures permanently so simply that an eight-year-old can understand it. How do I know? In real life, I explained it to an eight year old, and he understood, no problem. BTW, I have not discussed, and have no intention of discussing, that very simple aspect of strong El Niños in a blog post.
Ciao!
Hmmm… “permanently” raise global sea surface temperatures for how long? Permanently for six weeks, six permanent months, or permanently for six years, decades? I’m sure everyone has their own idea of what permanent means.
One thing I will permanently bet on, however, is that California will still refuse nature-sent opportunities to replenish water reservoirs for a decade yet. They should have taken the last drought as a sign to increase water storage capacity, but they refused. Nature may not offer them many more opportunities before the-drought-that-counts arrives.
Not sure where Bob gets this from. Should read his book I guess. In a slowly rising temp world an El Nino might lead to a rise in the sense that the accumulated energy had held atmospheric temperatures back for a while. Permanent ??
Only if on an up elevator , in neutral conditions it would drop with the next La Nina.
Will there be an el nino?
I’m reminded of story of the two prisoners (both gambling addicts) who would make bets on whether or not a fly would land on the wall!
“The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) remains neutral – neither El Niño nor La Niña. The ENSO Outlook is INACTIVE, meaning there is little sign of El Niño or La Niña developing in the coming months.“.
– Australian Bureau of meteorology ‘ENSO Wrap-up’ (http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/) issued 27 March 2018 (next issue 10 April 2018). If I remember correctly, they say that ENSO is very difficult to forecast from before about June to after.
Predictions are very difficult to make…especially where they concern ‘the future’!
BOM has a different ENSO threshold to NOAA. From memory BOM use 5 overlapping seasons (3-month periods) at +/- 0.8C of the long term average SST in ENSO 3.4; whereas NOAA use 5 overlapping seasons at +/- 0.5C.
Looks like NOAA are calling the period from JAS 2017 to JFM 2018 a La Nina episode (coloured blue on the linked table).
http://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ONI_v5.php
Sorry, should be SON 2017 to JFM 2018.
BOM seem to be desperately hoping this La Nina will go away soon – before it destroys their narrative.
Here’s the current progress of enso
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_update/sstanim.gif
Zoom out…
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_update/gsstanim.shtml
Thanks!
I’d like to see which way the winds are blowing.
You might use earth.nullschool.net to look back a ways. You would need a program that would harvest the data available and produce a similar graphic of wind patterns during that same period. I’m not sure that there isn’t already something like that available… anybody know without looking it up?
Oops,
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_update/gsstanim.gif
(Be wiser than I and check those file extensions before posting)
Reminds me of February 2017, when almost every model was convinced a new El Niño was coming last autumn. Duh! None of the myriad ENSO models was capable of forecasting what happened.
ECMWF System 4 model:
IRI/CPC plume of 23 different models:
Not a single one of them predicted what happened, and the spread of -0.7 to +1.6 in September is shameful. There are taking good money for random chance models.
ENSO remains unpredictable. We don’t have a clue about what will happen next fall with ENSO.
Thanks, Javier, well illustrated point.
Javier, i see your opening that los ninos can of worms again…
Which would be the proper way to say the following:
Will there be an el nino?
or (o)
Will there be el nino?
I know I am nitpicking, but it hurts my eyes to see the plural in the noun and not in the article.
In English “El Niño” is a borrowed noun, so ‘Will there be an El Niño’ is correct.
Considering that we have to distinguish between El Niño conditions that can take place at any time, and El Niño events that require El Niño conditions for five consecutive three month averages (NOAA definition), I think the best way to say the plural is to refer to El Niño events avoiding the Spanish plural issue.
I totally agree. This desire to ‘predict’ chaotic systems is something that I find quite irritating for some reason.
If the ENSO system has been running for millions of years, and if El Nino warming of the global sea surface isn’t counterbalanced by La Nina cooling of the global sea surface, then one might well ask how come the global oceans haven’t boiled dry by now?
Waiting for el Ninot, scene 5
Adapted from http://samuel-beckett.net/Waiting_for_Godot_Part1.html
ESTRAGON: People are bloody ignorant apes.
VLADIMIR: Pah!
ESTRAGON: Charming spot. Inspiring prospects. (He turns to Vladimir.) Let’s go.
VLADIMIR: We can’t.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for el Ninot.
ESTRAGON: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You’re sure it was here?
VLADIMIR: What?
ESTRAGON: That we were to wait.
VLADIMIR: He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do you see any others?
ESTRAGON: What is it?
VLADIMIR: I don’t know. A bristlecone pine.
ESTRAGON: Where are the leaves?
VLADIMIR: It must be dead.
[!! .mod]
With Al Gore as Pozzo.
I expect at least one more powerful El Nino before the cooling due to low solar activity sets in. During the 20th. century period of high solar activity, the oceans have absorbed huge amounts of heat energy. Now that solar energy has reduced over the last 2 decades, an imbalance between atmospheric and ocean temperatures has arisen. The equilibrium can only be restored by the oceans shedding excess heat, thus we had the 2015/2016 very powerful El Nino. The El Nino is followed by a period when the excess heat transferred to the atmosphere escapes into space. I believe that period is now ending as GMT has returned to the pre-El Nino level. This has created a new imbalance so the oceans will discharge more of their excess heat in the form of a new El Nino. This process will keep on repeating until an equilibrium is reached appropriate to the amount of heat now being received from the Sun, and GMT drops by maybe a degree or more.
Dear Bob, you tell us that “if you’re wondering how a strong El Niño can (and does) raise global sea surface temperatures permanently”, we obviously haven’t read your book, which “explained how a strong El Niño can (and does) raise global sea surface temperatures permanently so simply that an eight-year-old can understand it.”
When I was about eight years old, my own dad explained the following to me: “permanently is a very long time”……
Will There Be A 2018/19 El Niño?
The crystal ball is clearing…
Neutral to mildly el Niño appears to be on the horizon, if not soon then later…
Kelvin waves are gravity waves; they transport energy, but not matter. While their appearance along the equatorial thermocline may be a harbinger, it’s the eastward flow of near-surface water that physically produces an El Nino. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between that flow and the shifting position of sub-surface anomalies in a Hovmoller diagram.
Brianrlcatt. Thanks for all your comments. Agree with all your remarks. Finally some common sense and sanity about climate – it’s the Oceans that drive it; and your remarks about’ Malthusians’, people whose real aim is to prevent the development of humanity in developing nations. Keeping ‘down’ other human groups, as well as anti-human self-hatred. Same-old same-old that has existed since the dawn of humanity.